Mike McCahill

It always finds new, invariably cinematic ways to nudge us towards its final leap into the abyss. Cronin feels like a real find for our especially insecure moment.

You emerge from this brutally unsentimental education with your chest pounding and your ears ringing – its radical empathy extends to putting us in not just the same room as its subjects, but the same helpless, despairing position. Some films are made to leave you speechless; for some experiences, there can be no words.

The movie’s a great night out, but you sense it’ll also become a priceless resource.

Like José Luis Guerín's brilliant 2007 curio "In the City of Sylvia," this is one of those rare films that may change the way you view the world.

The debutant director applies himself with the same quiet assurance and attention to detail he’s displayed in his acting projects.

After India decriminalised homosexuality last September, many wondered anew: what would a Bollywood romcom look and sound like with a non-straight protagonist? The answer, it transpires, is: much the same as any other Bollywood romcom.

At its best – in a boundless chase round a hackers’ hangout, and a high-speed freeway pursuit – Upgrade is as fluid and exhilarating as anything the Wachowskis signed their names to in the days when they were brothers: the kind of nifty, sometimes nasty surprise our multiplexes sorely need.

For all The Falling’s period trimmings, its uncanny power resides in these ellipses and blackouts – in elements that cannot be easily rationalised.

An unexpected joy.

The good news is that it remains terrific: punchy, old-school stunt work, crisply uncluttered cutting, and varied, inventive baddie-splattering from the moment Aatami deploys one of those beams to take down a jet fighter.

This production’s triumph is the room it’s granted Rajamouli to head into the fields and dream up endlessly expressive ways to frame bodies in motion.

It may wind up as the year's most significant horror film; it's certainly among the most original.

Unimprovably brisk at 91 minutes, Watcher is not messing around – and probably won’t hang around long in cinemas with starry awards fare in the offing. But a few more of these nifty diversions, and the multiplexes might once again be a viable night out.

Baahubali demonstrates the pleasing, straight-ahead simplicity of certain videogames: whenever our hero accomplishes a task, some new challenge presents itself.

The film’s insidious crawl away from comedy into sweaty waking nightmare is arresting indeed. As is, finally, its insistence that some elements of American life remain too serious to joke about.

What this exceptionally lucid film-survey reveals is what has to go on at ground level, and beneath the surface, in order to power a powerhouse.

A social conscience movie with real cinematic bite.

You’ll shed a tear or two, possibly more.

It’s a film of few frills or flourishes, which never tries to dress up its subject or soften its blows. Yet in its rage and its pain, in the wire-brush scrub it gives to the movies’ woozily romantic notions of alcoholism, Glassland feels wholly honest and true.

Uncommonly alert to small, telling details, while more expansive in its attitudes, the result proves far richer and worldlier than anything previously observed coming down the Khyber Pass.

If the plot’s familiar, no imagination or expense has been spared in mapping the kingdom it winds through.

Railing against rising tides, Gore emerges as a cannier performer and a more compelling subject than he was in 2006; a message that sounded critical then has become no less urgent with time.

Longinotto and editor Ollie Huddleston stitch it, with lightness and dexterity, into a wholly edifying, often stirring tapestry of survivors’ stories.

The film remains fascinatingly warped: an extended study in decaying flesh, set to a score mordantly trying to break into Hooray for Hollywood.

McEnroe makes a fascinating focal point.

Considering these characters are bounced round like pinballs, it’s amazing Hawke and the hitherto unknown Snook gain the emotional traction they do: even those struggling to keep up can’t fail to notice how these two are burnt, figuratively and literally, by their experiences.

It’s spry, stirring entertainment foremost – arguably indulging its star with one drunk number too many – but also evidence of a country beginning to tell its own stories with confidence and justifiable pride.

While it’s unfolding before us, it provides – whatever else the courts insist we call it – stirring, seductive spectacle.